The Madonna on the Moon

by Rolf Bauerdick

  Stephanescu was going to send his henchmen to Baia Luna, if they weren’t already on their way. Raducanu would be showing up soon. Very soon, and certainly not alone. I wouldn’t get away with playing a cheap trick on him a second time. I had to act, and right now. All traces that led from the display windows of Hofmann’s photo studio to Baia Luna had to be removed. I couldn’t deny the trade of the TV for the darkroom equipment and the telescope, not after Raducanu’s visit to Gheorghe Gherghel. But there couldn’t be any evidence that a darkroom had actually been set up in the village. Only Ilja, Kathalina, and Dimitru knew of its existence. Now I’d see whether my family could not just stick together but also be smart. I called Grandfather, my mother, and Dimitru together for an urgent conversation. I had to show them some of my cards without letting them know about my failed attempt to topple the Kronauburg party chief from his pedestal. Once I gathered them together, we all sat down, and I turned to my mother without beating around the bush.

  “Do you remember that disgusting photograph you found under my mattress?”

  Kathalina blushed. “Oh yes, very well.”

  “And do you remember the guy who was squirting champagne?”

  Embarrassed, Mother nodded. “Why are you bringing up that horrible thing again?”

  Dimitru interrupted, “What kind of filth are you talking about, Pavel? And can you tell me why I have to sit and listen to this?”

  “That photograph showed a naked woman and some half-naked men, among them the Kronauburg party secretary,” I explained. “Fritz Hofmann found the picture in one of his father’s moving crates and gave it to me. And Dr. Stephanescu has a powerful interest in never allowing that picture to be copied and distributed. And that’s why he’s having the Securitate search for the negative.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Grandfather. “Why don’t they search in Hofmann’s studio? What’s it got to do with us?”

  “Heinrich Hofmann had a motorcycle accident ten days ago. He’s dead.”

  “How awful!” Kathalina said and covered her face with her hands. “You say he’s dead?”

  “Yes. The trouble is the Securitate thinks I’ve got the negative. They’re after me.”

  “But how did they get that idea?” Ilja wondered.

  I lied. “I don’t know. Probably because I was a good friend of Fritz’s. Or maybe because of the telescope and the photo stuff. After all, it looks suspicious to have the lab equipment if you don’t have any negatives. How am I going to explain to the Securitate that we needed the darkroom for your Madonna photos? They’ll put me right into the nuthouse. They already grabbed Gheorghe Gherghel. His nephew Matei was just here. He says they arrested his uncle yesterday because he let us have the darkroom setup. It’s against the law now.”

  “The basic question is,” Dimitru interjected, “do you have the negative? Yes or no?”

  I lied again. “No. But the Securitate’s going to turn this place upside down. We have to hide everything: the darkroom, your telescope, the camera!”

  “Including Dimitru’s Madonna photos?” asked Grandfather.

  “Everything’s got to go.” I thought for a moment. “Except the radio.”

  “Okay,” said Dimitru. “Do you have a plan?”

  “Yes, more or less.”

  Kathalina was trembling with fear, and suddenly it was all too much for her. “I knew it!” she cried out. “All this craziness of yours brings nothing but trouble. Now the security agents are coming to get all of us. You’ll all end up in prison, and so will I. Just because of that dirty picture!”

  “Calm down, Mother.” I put my arm around her shoulders. “You burned that picture.”

  Kathalina was sobbing. Finally she wiped her tears away with her apron. “I . . . I . . . I . . . ,” she stammered in embarrassment, “didn’t burn it. I wanted to, but then . . . I hid it.” Mother left us sitting at the table, went upstairs, and returned, blushing bright red. She opened the door to the stove.

  “Are you crazy?” cried Dimitru. “You can’t burn that!” The Gypsy jumped up in a flash and grabbed the photo out of her hand. He stared at the picture and winced. He didn’t seem surprised so much as unable to trust his eyes. He held the photo up to the light and then looked at it up close again, as if seeking something hidden in it. Then he tapped his finger on the man with the champagne bottle.

  “This one, Pavel, he’s Stephanescu?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” murmured the Gypsy. “And he wants to get his hands on this photo and the film. For evidential reasons. Should we prevent that? Yes, we should. Which makes the situation serious—very serious.”

  “Give it back,” wailed Kathalina. “We’ve got to burn it.”

  “Of course, of course, my dear! Ashes to ashes. But all in good time. It’s still too early to burn it. You’re afraid this photo is a threat to us. No, no, it isn’t. It’s a threat to this Stephanescu. It’s giving him a giant headache. But Pavel’s going to protect this picture, protect it like a holy relic, not like those fakes the Gypsies try to sell you. It’d be a mistake to throw it into the fire, believe me. An error fatal. But it would be an even bigger mistake to let this precious photo fall into the hands of the Securitate. Pavel, do you know of a safe hiding place that would never occur to those chuckleheads in the Security Service?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good.” Dimitru handed me the photo. “Can we hide the lab equipment there, too?”

  “No. There’s not enough room. But your Madonna pictures will fit.”

  Dimitru closed his eyes and raised his face to the ceiling.

  “What are you doing?” asked Grandfather, who was fidgeting as if sitting on hot coals.

  “Shhh. I’m thinking of a hiding place and asking Papa Baptiste for heavenly succor.”

  “Johannes Baptiste,” I cried, “that’s it! I know a place the Securitate will never look for all that lab junk.”

  Dimitru opened his eyes. “Me, too.” And then, without pausing for breath, “Are you all ready to do a little playacting? We should rehearse a little.”

  “What do you mean ‘rehearse’? What kind of playacting?”

  “It’s simple. When that Lupu fellow shows up here, we’ll all be onstage and ready to raise the curtain. Then we’ll give a performance inspired by our phantasmagorical rationality. A dog only barks when you’re afraid of it. We’re going to turn the world upside down and throw that cur Raducanu a bone that’ll give him plenty to gnaw on.”

  Two hours later we’d worked out our strategy and practiced our parts for the performance. Mother had calmed down, felt reassured, and knew exactly what she was supposed to do and say. I, too, had put aside my fear, and Dimitru was rubbing his hands together as if looking forward to the encounter with Lupu Raducanu with malicious glee.

  Since we expected Raducanu and his men to turn the whole village upside down looking for the darkroom, I went over to the Petrovs’ to warn Petre and his father Trojan that their house would probably be searched. The carbine and scope the Petrovs occasionally used to go poaching could cause them some problems. It turned out my warning was superfluous. “They can search all through the mountains till they’re blue in the face.” Petre laughed.

  When I was sure Baia Luna was asleep, I stole into the church, opened the tabernacle, and put in the Madonna pictures and the photo. Then I pinched a couple votive candles and met Dimitru in the laundry room of the rectory.

  The lab was just as I had left it two weeks ago. As expected, it smelled strongly of chemicals, and as planned, Dimitru had brought along the little bottle of Rêves de la Nuit perfume that had been gathering dust in our shop for years. Dimitru lit the candles while I opened the cellar window. Then I disposed of the cloudy brown developer liquid, rinsed the sink clean, and disassembled the enlarger. A half hour later all evidence of the presence of a darkroom had been removed. The Gypsy dragged in a few worn-out mattresses that had been stacked in the base
ment hallway and sprayed everything with Rêves de la Nuit to drive out the lab odors. There was an overwhelming scent of roses, and I felt a twinge in my heart: it was the same perfume Angela Barbulescu had used. I saw her again in her sunflower dress, hanging from a black beech on the Mondberg. Your last hour has already struck, Angela had written in her farewell letter to Stephanescu. She was mistaken. Angela Barbulescu had not found justice before she died or since then either. And my attempt to destroy Stephanescu with the compromising photo had been a miserable failure.

  After midnight we gathered up the lab equipment and snuck across the village square to the churchyard. We stood before the grave that had been dug years ago for the body of our priest Johannes Baptiste. In a short while, the enlarger, trays for the developer and fixer, and bottles of chemicals, as well as the camera, telescope, and the key to the laundry room, had disappeared into the hole, which was now filled in and topped with rotted wreaths, bouquets of plastic flowers, and tattered silk bows. I hung on to a cardboard box with photos of stags in rut. It was part of our plan. Then we went to bed. Let Lupu Raducanu come if he was going to.

  And he did, next morning at eight. And as expected, he wasn’t alone.

  A dozen militiamen jumped out of three olive-green SUVs and formed into groups of three.

  “Search all the empty houses first!” ordered Captain Cartarescu.

  The men fanned out. Then Cartarescu and Major Raducanu headed straight for our concession. That was the cue for Kathalina’s first scene.

  She opened the door and came out to meet them.

  “About time you show your faces around here again. Are you going to return our things or pay us compensation?”

  Raducanu and Cartarescu slowed their steps. Now Grandfather, Dimitru, and I came out of the shop as well. “I don’t want compensation, I want my lab and my camera back!” I shouted at my mother.

  “And I want my telescope! Are you going to give it back to me or not?” Granddad was really into his part. He seemed genuinely outraged.

  “You crooks!” raged Dimitru. “First you confiscate all our beautiful equipment and then you’re not even going to compensate us for it. That’s what we call robbery, you outlaws!”

  Raducanu lost his temper. “Shut up!” he screamed, several times. “Shut up!” His voice cracked. His downy cheeks were flushed.

  Dimitru was uncowed. “You steal like magpies and then blame it all on the Gypsies.” He clenched his fists and spat on the ground.

  Captain Cartarescu struggled to get hold of himself and finally drew his pistol.

  “Everybody into the store! Into the store for questioning!”

  “But you already questioned us two weeks ago! Do we have to go through this again? It’s getting to be a drag.” I could feel that our play was working according to plan.

  Major Raducanu asked for an ashtray and lit up a Kent. He inhaled deeply, trying hard to keep his cool. “You purchased a darkroom kit and optical instruments in a shop in Kronauburg. Where are they?”

  “We didn’t purchase them, we traded for them,” shouted Ilja. “Traded a good TV, a German Loewe Optalux. You got any idea what something like that is worth?”

  “Where the hell is that darkroom, goddamnit?” Raducanu was steaming.

  “Are you serious?” I replied calmly. “Your colleagues were here two weeks ago and confiscated everything. They promised to bring it back if it was all legit. We’ve been waiting ever since.”

  “What? What colleagues?” Cartarescu spluttered.

  “Your left hand doesn’t know what your right hand is doing, apparently,” I said. “Two majors from the Security Service.”

  “And Heinrich Hofmann,” Ilja added, “but he didn’t have anything to do with the confiscation.”

  Totally perplexed, Lupu Raducanu massaged his temples. He obviously had no idea where to begin asking all the questions he had. “So tell me once more: two majors were here from the Security Service? That’s impossible because I would have known about it.”

  I assumed an expression of bewildered innocence. “But they were here and Heinrich Hofmann was with them.”

  “He must have had something to take care of in his old house since—”

  Raducanu cut Grandfather off. “We’ll get to Hofmann later. These two men: when were they here and what did they want, exactly?”

  “That’s just what we’d like to know,” I replied. “At first we had no idea they were from the Securitate. We thought they were here to collectivize us, that it had something to do with expropriation.”

  “They sat right here!” Ilja pointed to one of the tables in the taproom. “My daughter-in-law even served them coffee.”

  “Couldn’t be bothered to thank me,” hissed Kathalina.

  I continued, “They asked me if I knew Heinrich Hofmann’s son Fritz. What a stupid question! I spent eight years at the desk next to his at school! Did I still have contact with him? How would I? He’s been living in Germany for years and I’m sure he thanks his lucky stars for every day he doesn’t have to spend in this boring Podunk. Suddenly those guys wanted to know if I was also a photography enthusiast. Yes, of course, ever since Herr Hofmann’s assistant showed me how a darkroom worked. I even took the two security people into our storeroom to show them all the equipment I’m so proud of, the things we traded the TV for in Gheorghe Gherghel’s shop. And you know what one of them told me?”

  “I’m all ears,” said Raducanu.

  “‘You can be arrested for having these things in your possession!’ These guys are crazy, I thought. I hadn’t even unpacked all the stuff yet. But they explained that it had been obtained illegally.”

  “But it was all legalamente. Or do the rules of Socialism forbid trades?” Raducanu ignored Dimitru’s remark and turned to Kathalina.

  “These two men supposedly from a state agency—what did they look like?”

  “My God, what did they look like? Let’s see—like men from the city. One was wearing a nice sport coat, salt and pepper, very good material. The bigger of the two had on a brown leather coat, even though it was very warm. He was a least a head taller than his partner with the glasses. If you ask me, the man in glasses looked educated, somehow. Not like those ruffians from the state militia.”

  “The one with glasses looked like a politician,” I interjected, “or maybe a doctor.”

  “A doctor with glasses?” Raducanu pricked up his ears, took out a pad of paper, and made some notes. On his right ring finger was a gold wedding ring.

  “Did the men tell you their names?”

  “No, but the tall one was very striking,” continued Kathalina. “With a mustache. Early forties, I’d say.”

  “And he had a wart on his cheek,” I added. “On the right side . . . no, the left . . . to my left, so it was on his right cheek.”

  “A big one,” said Dimitru.

  Kathalina shook her head. “That wasn’t a wart, it was a birthmark. But it was very noticeable.”

  The major continued to take notes. He seemed to be calming down.

  “What was Hofmann the photographer doing here?” Raducanu addressed the question directly to Grandfather.

  “I don’t know. He hasn’t been in the village in years, not since he moved to Kronauburg. They say he can’t get his house here sold. Who’s going to move to Baia Luna in times like these? Anyway, while they were questioning us, he went to his old house. Maybe he left something there by accident when he moved away. All I know is that he roared away with the other two in one of those green jeeps. And they took my telescope and my grandson’s photo equipment with them.”

  Raducanu gave me a sharp look. “Why do you need a darkroom?”

  “Hang on!” I ran upstairs and returned with the box of photographs. I spread the rutting stags out on the table. “Impressive, aren’t they? When I saw these pictures at Mr. Gherghel’s it struck me like a bolt of lightning: that’s what I want to do, too! Hunting with a camera. Tha
t would be fun. There’s nothing going on here in Baia Luna. And besides, the stags in our mountains are even more impressive than these in the photos. I should be able to make some money with pictures like these or better.”

  Raducanu thought it over. “What about the telescope?”

  It was the question Kathalina had been waiting for, and she jumped right in. “Idiots! They went and traded my beautiful TV for that telescope, these two loonies right here!” She was pointing at Dimitru and Grandfather. “I told you that thing would cause us trouble, didn’t I? But nobody listens to me.”

  Dimitru played the wounded party. “You don’t know the first thing about scientific precision or about morbus lunaticus.”

  “Feel free to call your disease by its proper name: lunacy—moon sickness. My father-in-law’s moon sick and epileptic,” Mother stormed on, “and this Gypsy persuaded him to get the telescope—to observe the moon.”

  Ilja went to the cash register where all our important family documents were kept and handed Cartarescu the medical certificate without uttering a word.

  “She’s right,” the captain conceded. “The Kronauburg hospital diagnosed epilepsy.”

  Raducanu didn’t even glance at the paper. He demanded another glass of water, opened a pill bottle, and swallowed a handful of headache tablets.

  “That’s what I said,” repeated Dimitru. “My friend Ilja suffers from lunaticus morbus. And so it’s logical for him to observe the moon minutely through a telescope. Determine the causes! That’s what he’s doing. But it looks like there are certain people in this country who have a powerful interest in preventing our research. Pinched our telescope without further ado in the name of state security. Are we going to get compensated for it or not?”